This class examines important thinkers writing in French from the 1960’s to the present. Readings cover seminal texts from Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Latour, Deleuze, Irigaray, and Ranciere. However, special attention will be given to the three giants of French thought: Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze. Topics to be covered include the social impact of technological developments, reality and virtuality, social repression, freedom, the nature of desire, language and commmunication, sexual difference, modern democracy, and revolutionary politics.
After the failed 1968 student uprising, French philosophers set about to explain why Marxist revolution never came to pass. This not only led them to examine new forms of social control that, they claimed, impeded social progress; it led them to question whether previous philosophical thought, including the most prevalent philosophical methods of the day (Hegelianism, structuralism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism itself) were complicit in perpetuating social ills. This class examines the ideas and philosophical methods French thinkers developed in response: post-structuralism, deconstruction, and archeology.
We will see that, different as they are, all these thinkers are rightly subsumed under the heading of “postmodern philosophers” in that they all share a common distrust of totalizing thought, especially in its recurrent attempts to delegitimize, marginalize, or exclude what cannot be fit into neat philosophical categories. Most importantly though, these philosophers all share a fervent desire to break out of established ways of thinking and acting—impossible though this may seem. Indeed, their philosophical task has been justly called “thinking the impossible.”